Some counter-intuitive customer-centricity lessons from Zerodha
Some counterintuitive customer-centricity lessons from Zerodha – the Bangalore headquartered retail broker that has embarrassed many ‘Bombaiya’ brokers:
- Zerodha claims that no employee carries a revenue target. Targets are good but lead to pressure & bad behaviour (read that as mis-selling). Happy non-pressurised well-supervised salesmen sell more!
- If you call their customer service number you feel you are talking with a tech-support & not a B2C helpdesk. I will never rate them 5/5 on knowledge or empathy but 5/5 on helpfulness & not over-selling me anything. OK for a DIY stock investor.
- They have 1 million clients & add 50K new clients every month. My onboarding experience wasn’t spectacular but am happy to absorb that @ Rs. 20/trade vs. >Rs. 100/trade from others.
- Zerodha doesn’t hire IIT-IIM types. They hire non branded grads, treat them well & they stick on. The process is so good that you dont need nerds to run it.
- They are completely driven by promoter’s equity. Inspite of getting attractive valuations – they haven’t taken VC money. So no pressure for hockey-stick growth – built to stick!
Indeed fintech is eating BFSI – in India too – if you can get the execution, pricing & scale right…
Written with data obtained from a customer letter by Nithin Kamath, founder-CEO of Zerodha